More Vista Headaches
20/08/07 22:33 Filed in: Personal
Well, I discovered another pain point with Vista. Activation. (Which is well known, of course; so I guess it’s more like being reminded of it...)
Anyway, the problem is that I’ve got Vista installed & activated from Boot Camp. Works gre- well, it works. Sorta. At least it’s activated.
Well, VMware Fusion (well, not just Fusion, Workstation’s done it for years) has this nifty ability to use a partition for the VM. This means that you can use the boot camp install, and just boot it into the VM. And it works well enough. (Even though Vista support is still considered experimental). The problem is with Windows Activation.
Because the hardware is virtualized in VMware, when you boot from VMware, Vista sees that the hardware has changed, and demands that it be re-activated or it will stop working.
The VMware forums solution is more or less “You have to re-activate it each time you switch between the two.” So, it looks like Vista won’t be running from VMware, which is a shame. (Not really; as I said before, my reason for Vista is largely because I didn’t have an XP SP2 install CD/License, and Boot Camp will let me do Wintendo-ish things). Is there any actual work that I would do from inside Vista? I doubt it. But it would have been nice to use VMware’s “unity” mode should anybody give me a document in one of Microsoft’s proprietary formats, or if there’s a DRM-protected stream that I can’t watch outside of Windows.
I contacted Microsoft Support about the whole situation; we’ll see if anything happens. My guess: Nothing’s gonna happen. Which is unfortunate for Microsoft, because not being able to boot to Vista from both Boot Camp and VMware simply means that I’ll use Vista even less. (Not that I’m suggesting it’s unfortunate for me that I’ll be using Vista less.)
It’s also a kick in the teeth, because i paid the extra cash for the “Vista Ultimate Edition” so that I could legally run Vista from inside VMware. Except I can’t run inside VMware because of their paranoid activation...
Anyway, the problem is that I’ve got Vista installed & activated from Boot Camp. Works gre- well, it works. Sorta. At least it’s activated.
Well, VMware Fusion (well, not just Fusion, Workstation’s done it for years) has this nifty ability to use a partition for the VM. This means that you can use the boot camp install, and just boot it into the VM. And it works well enough. (Even though Vista support is still considered experimental). The problem is with Windows Activation.
Because the hardware is virtualized in VMware, when you boot from VMware, Vista sees that the hardware has changed, and demands that it be re-activated or it will stop working.
The VMware forums solution is more or less “You have to re-activate it each time you switch between the two.” So, it looks like Vista won’t be running from VMware, which is a shame. (Not really; as I said before, my reason for Vista is largely because I didn’t have an XP SP2 install CD/License, and Boot Camp will let me do Wintendo-ish things). Is there any actual work that I would do from inside Vista? I doubt it. But it would have been nice to use VMware’s “unity” mode should anybody give me a document in one of Microsoft’s proprietary formats, or if there’s a DRM-protected stream that I can’t watch outside of Windows.
I contacted Microsoft Support about the whole situation; we’ll see if anything happens. My guess: Nothing’s gonna happen. Which is unfortunate for Microsoft, because not being able to boot to Vista from both Boot Camp and VMware simply means that I’ll use Vista even less. (Not that I’m suggesting it’s unfortunate for me that I’ll be using Vista less.)
It’s also a kick in the teeth, because i paid the extra cash for the “Vista Ultimate Edition” so that I could legally run Vista from inside VMware. Except I can’t run inside VMware because of their paranoid activation...